A few minutes after 7 p.m. Friday in the Rangers’ Hall of Fame room, general manager Jon Daniels gathered his prepared notes and nervously began his internationally broadcast introduction of the most intriguing signing in the club’s history.

The night that was supposed to be about Yu Darvish, however, began with an impassioned “thank you” to the Rangers’ scouting department and ownership group.

“The work our scouts did — their diligence, their passion and their willingness to put in time — allowed us to comfortably make a recommendation to ownership,” Daniels said. “And our scouts’ effort and creativity was matched only by our ownership group.”

It was appropriate.

Without either group going to unprecedented lengths, the introduction of the 25-year-old Japanese pitcher to Texas would never have happened.

The road to Darvish was a five-year odyssey that cost far more than just the $106.7 million the Rangers spent on his six-year contract. It essentially required the creation of a new branch of the scouting department. And it required convincing owners who came from the oil and gas business that this exercise was not mere wildcatting but was more likely to produce results.

This is how it all came together.

Scouting him

When the Rangers overhauled the organization in 2007, the big moves were to create a huge draft class and to trade Mark Teixeira for a huge return. Less noticed: the December hiring of Jim Colborn as director of Pacific Rim operations.

If the Rangers were going to create a long-term contender, they needed to be able to procure talent from the emerging Asian market, too. With Colborn’s hiring, the Rangers got an experienced Asian scout to supervise a department that consisted of, well, Jim Colborn.

Within a year, the Rangers had a specific goal: Sign at least one player a year out of Asia who could contribute in the majors. A year after that, the goal became more specific: Be prepared to know Darvish like no organization had known a Japanese player in case he went through the posting process.

“We were going to go all out to measure him up,” said Josh Boyd, who runs the Rangers’ professional scouting department. “We were going to start a really thorough homework process on and off the field to get to know him as a player and a person.”

In short, the Rangers combined two types of U.S. scouting — amateur and free agent. In preparation for the draft, amateur scouts try to get to know their potential targets as people, not just pure talents, to identify their growth potential. In scouting potential major league free agents, pro scouts may spend most of a season homing in on one or two guys.

A total of 12 club officials — including Daniels — saw Darvish pitch in person in 2011. They saw 22 of his 28 starts.

They weren’t alone. The New York Yankees and Toronto Blue Jays were also regularly represented at Darvish’s starts. And other clubs made occasional appearances.

“There were a lot of guys there with radar guns,” said Darvish representative Don Nomura, a veteran of dealing with Japanese talent. “But the Rangers were there with more than that.”

The Rangers had signed Darvish’s former teammate Yoshinori Tateyama. They had added scout Joe Furukawa, who like Colborn had a long history and lots of relationships within Nippon Professional Baseball. They reached out to Farsad Darvish, the pitcher’s father.

There was one more innovative step that can’t be overlooked: The Rangers didn’t really assess Darvish as a Japanese pitcher. They viewed him as simply a potential free agent coming from Japan. It’s a subtle-sounding distinction but was big in the Rangers’ evaluation process.

Darvish didn’t look like a Japanese pitcher. At 6-5, he’s taller than any starter who had tried to transition from Japan to the majors. His size gives him more power than most Japanese pitchers, and the Rangers noticed a distinct uptick in his velocity over their two years of scouting him. He went from a 90-92 mph fastball to 93-95. That gives him more ability to rely on the fastball, a quality Japanese pitchers have often lacked when they come to the U.S.

And over the last year, Colborn saw a pitcher who refined his repertoire to working mostly with two pitches and commanding them, rather than throwing a wider array of pitches that are often more difficult to command.

It made him a different commodity from any Japanese pitcher who had come before.

“Quite frankly, we tried to be a little more sophisticated than just judging him against guys who grew up in the same place,” Daniels said. “He is different.”

Bidding for him

Seeing Darvish as a free-agent pitcher rather than a Japanese free-agent pitcher was key to the presentations Daniels and assistant GM Thad Levine made to club president and CEO Nolan Ryan.

By the time the winter meetings in Dallas began, Ryan was on board.

“We looked at him as the No. 1 pitching talent out there,” Ryan said. “We looked at his age and thought that if he signed him, we’d be signing a pitcher just as he’s coming into his most productive seasons. Very seldom to do you get a shot at a free agent of that caliber at that age.”

When the meetings began at the Hilton Anatole, the Rangers took a hard line with C.J. Wilson. On Tuesday of the meetings, the Rangers told Bob Garber, Wilson’s agent, they didn’t see themselves making anything more than a four-year commitment to Wilson, and they weren’t going to $15 million annually. Wilson was seeking six years and close to $100 million.

The next afternoon, Daniels, Levine and top advisers A.J. Preller, Don Welke and Boyd got a chance to make their three-hour pitch to Ray Davis, one of the club’s chairmen. As the meetings wound up, Darvish’s Japanese club, Hokkaido Nippon-Ham, announced it would post his rights up for bidding, and the Los Angeles Angels announced they had reached agreement with Wilson and Cardinals slugging first baseman Albert Pujols.

The Rangers management group went straight from the Anatole to the Fort Worth office of co-chairman Bob Simpson to make another three-hour pitch.

“I think we all drank 5-Hour Energys on the way over,” Daniels said.

The presentation included laying out trade scenarios, such as dealing for Oakland’s Gio Gonzalez, and pursuing some middle-of-the-rotation starters in their mid-30s. Daniels advocated what a perfect long-term fit Darvish would be with the Rangers’ young core of starters and how signing him would not take away from the pitching depth in the minors.

“I was pretty skeptical,” Simpson said. “But the presentation was so passionate and so thorough that I made almost a 180-degree turn. With a background in oil, I know the difference between wildcatting and production. I wanted to be able to lower the risks as much as possible. Their presentation did that.”

After that, all it took was putting together an actual bid. In that regard, the oilmen’s background came in handy, too.

The posting process is essentially a blind poker bet without an ability to see any of the other players’ cards. All the Rangers had to go on was the 5-year-old Daisuke Matsuzaka case. There was one school of thought that the number to beat would be the $51.1 million Boston paid; another that Boston had so widely overbid that other clubs would focus more on topping the New York Mets’ $37 million second-place bid.

When the group reconvened to finalize the bid on deadline day, Daniels’ scouts had not been able to ferret out any specific information about potential bid amounts by the Yankees or Toronto, expected to be the two top contenders.

“I told [Simpson and Davis] that I wish I had better intelligence,” Daniels said, “but I didn’t. I told them it could be anywhere from $30 million to $60 million. You are giving your bosses a $30 million range. That’s not really ideal.”

And so around the table they went discussing potential bids. Simpson went back to his background in bidding for properties.

“If we’re thinking it may be high, somebody else is probably thinking that way,” Simpson remembered.

Though it took up until the last minute of the 30-day negotiating window to sign Darvish, the negotiations were largely anticlimactic.

The hardest part was waiting five days to hear that the bid had been accepted.

“We were in limbo,” Ryan said.

At the announcement of Darvish’s signing last week, Daniels said there had never been a moment of contentiousness during the 30-day negotiation window. Daniels and Levine visited Los Angeles twice to meet with agent Arn Tellem, the other half of Darvish’s representation team. Boyd visited Japan to assure Darvish’s parents of the Rangers’ interest in their son beyond the pitcher’s mound. The key moment came in early January when Darvish and his father visited Dallas-Fort Worth.

On their second night in town, they dined at a table of 13 at Del Frisco’s Double Eagle in Fort Worth. It was the first time Ryan had seen Darvish in person.

“I felt like he was everything he had been represented to be,” Ryan said. “He looked like a pitcher. He was built like a pitcher. He sounded passionate and dedicated. My comfort level went way up.”

Darvish’s did, too. When asked Friday about coming to the Rangers, Darvish, through his interpreter, said:

“They made me feel comfortable. They treated me like I was part of their family.”

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